And you would make a poor boss, pointy haired or otherwise.
This is about turning a profit. I've been doing this for a long time. Optimizing for the developer is financially smart.
This isn't about building the rare "100 year flood" of an application. You'd be dumb to assume any given app you're developing will reach a critical mass. It's a bad bet.
Besides, it's not as if an app is slow so let's add a server. Clearly the first thing anybody would do is run it under a profiler and look for pinch points.
But optimizing from the get just because of an off chance that the application somehow gains an audience larger than predicted at design time.
No, I don't. I never passed any judgment except to say that if your company is facing bankruptcy, it might be a good idea to sideline inessential spending.
No offense, but I've been in this business (Contract software development) for a long time. Especially by the standards of our industry. And we've prospered.
I'm a software developer who runs a software shop.
And, not for nothing, we sell training to these companies. It's quite profitable for us, and we always have the competitive edge that we built it, we know it better than anyone else.
I'm a pretty good judge of ROI.
And there was no ROI here. The software is no easier to use.
My perception is that you wasted an awful lot of time writing up a response using invented math to prove a company you are unfamiliar with got a good return on a re-skinning of an application that you've never seen.
Allow me to preface by saying that I never once mentioned Drizzle. I see no niche that Drizzle appeals to.
But about MySQL: You're Missing The Point.
Little known fact: MySQL, when using isam -- and everyone uses isam, locks out table updates during READS
First, saying things like "everyone" is just silly. Inno is quite popular. It was purchased by Oracle for a reason: It creates a valuable product that's used by a lot of people.
Second, You're missing the point.
The VAST majority of apps deployed every day are NOT critical-mass applications. They are niche applications developed by (or for) Corporate IT Departments They are applications where the potential userbase is 30 people in an accounting department, or 100 people in a call center.
For these applications, a table lock is truly NOT a big deal.
Do the math. If you have 100 users, only a fraction will be simultaneous. And of those, how much actual server-side processing time is being spent? Even if a user is logged-in for 8 hours a day, what's the cumulative processing time? 2 minutes? 3?
The end product is a very low probability that a race condition will occur due to a table lock. It might happen, what, once a day? And when it does, the user goes back, re-submits, problem solved.
More over, the extra data you are retrieving from the database, because you are doing additional processing and selection in the application, means you are performing more I/O on the database server, which adds to the I/O bottlenec
Again, missing the point. These applications have no perceivable IO bottleneck.
But hey, if you think it is worth while, I'll be willing to debate you. I'll even let you start. Imagine you are a CTO and you are choosing a database for your web site, please write an executive summary explaining your choice and the criteria for your selection, why MySQL was a better choice than...
And, again, the point was missed:
Of the entire universe of software developers out there, a HUGE majority work for corporate IT departments. These are the people writing most of the software out there. This is the reason VB was in the top 3 most popular languages for nearly 2 decades.
These apps aren't being designed by a CTO. And they don't need to be.
You seem so hung-up on this "the company depends on my DBMS selection" mentality that it seems like you miss the boat entirely.
There's nothing wrong with MySQL. It serves its purpose.
And there's nothing wrong, necessarily, with sacrificing ACID compliance for speed.
The goal for those like you and I is to be sure these younger Dev's are using it appropriately.
For example, during a code review if you see a developer doing a multi-table insert where he's checking for an error and doing a manual roll-back of the insert, that's a perfect time to demonstrate transactions as a way to save the developer time.
Or when a dev wants to denormalize because a given query requires a dozen joins, that's a perfect time to demonstrate a view.
In many ways, the sheer popularity of MySQL gives it legitimacy.
The way to go about it isn't to make a dev feel dumb for using the software. He'll just think "Millions of people are using this, that old coot probably thinks I should be writing this web-app with C++ based CGI Scripts"
Of course, if you're one that thinks MySQL et al have no place in a production environment, maybe they SHOULDN'T be listening to you...
But they have the downside of splitting your app logic. Many would argue that it makes no sense to hold business logic in the DB tier.
There is no value in being religious about this in a small app with a small team.
But in large environments, it allows DBA's to ensure that every DB customer gets a fair and stable response time.
Think of a table with 1bn rows. If you can only query the views the DBA gives you rights to, you can't accidentally produce a cartesean product by passing-in a poorly coded INNER JOIN that DOS's the server.
And if you can only do an UPDATE via a prepared statement or a SPROC, you can't accidently truncate the table to munge the data by f'ing up your WHERE criteria.
It's funny how, 6-7 years ago people were talking about hitting 1 million hits per day. In 2008, with our quad-core Ghz-pounding monsters, most popular sites are actually serving less traffic per box than we did back in the day, because nobody cares to optimize anymore.
Ask yourself WHY that is.
It's simple: Hardware is MUCH cheaper today than it ever was before, and it'll be even cheaper tomorrow.
You know what ISN'T cheaper? Software developers.
It makes a lot more sense to optimize for the DEVELOPER than it does to optimize for the machine.
I can add another web server for $5000. Adding a developer is at least an order of magnitude more expensive.
But, the OP is a kid. You have to pay your dues if you want a life where you have the luxury of quitting your job and still having enough $ to live on.
But I would qualify that GWT shouldn't be lumped with "other frameworks."
It's simply a compiler that produces JS instead of Bytecode. As long as you can trust the compiler (and you can trust this compiler) then that removes a lot of headache. I'm not mocking you, but it would be like saying "Assembly is just too much of a beast to debug..."
The beauty is that you never need to debug the JS. If there's an error, you debug the Java inside eclipse.
And in the absolute worst-case scenario, you set the flag that tells GWT not to minimize the JS code so you can track down specific parts of the JS code and use that to tweak the corresponding Java code.
But when was the last time you needed to decompile, say, a C++ application in order to debug it? These things don't happen very often...
Let me preface by saying I started a software development shop with a couple partners about a decade ago. We've got about a dozen developers on staff now. I've probably hired 25 developers in my tenure here. I'm a software developer myself.
There's nothing wrong with enthusiasm. It's definitely an asset.
But there's also nothing wrong with a deep dedication.
If you presented your recent posts in resume format, it would probably throw as big of a red-flag off in my head as a guy who mastered one single language and never branched out.
I don't care who you are, truly mastering a modern language takes at least 6 months. A developer can be proficient in a language in 30 days, especially if he's around other developers that can answer questions. But knowing it inside and out, knowing common pitfalls and how to avoid them, knowing best-practices (and worst practices), knowing the internals of, say, the garbage collector and class loader and event dispatcher, really MASTERING it takes time.
And writing any non-trivial application in a language is going to also take months.
The candidate that can demonstrate that he's mastered increasingly complex languages, and used them to develop increasingly complex applications. That's the holy grail of a job candidate.
Knowing a framework or SDK is really of little value to me. If we do use one that you've tried out, telling me that you've "given a look at it" will mean nothing to me. The frameworks that we do use, we use HARD. We stretch them and manipulate them. But chances are we won't.
What I think you'll find in most software shops, whether they're software companies or just coroporate IT Departments is that no 2 frameworks are ever exactly alike.
That is, once you start using a framework, you can very rarely upgrade it to the next version without breaking your existing codebase.
For this reason, it's common for a company to branch a framework, usually privately, where they augment or supplement it to solve whatever problem they're trying to solve.
Being a slave to the fresh SDK or framework of the day is not an appealing quality. Although I admire your thirst for knowledge, I'd wait to hire you until I could have confidence that you could work with the same language, and the same framework, and maybe even the same app for as long as it takes to get the job done.
My advice to all young developers is exactly what I said above:
Master increasingly complex languages. Stick with it for 6-12 months and master it. And use them to build increasingly complex applications.
I think the market has shifted a bit more than you're giving it credit for.
But it all depends on your niche.
We built our business on web retail and we still do an awful lot of it. And in that world, you simply cannot afford to lose a customer due to whatever whizbang technology you want to use at the moment.
But outside of retail is very different.
And the truth is, non-JS visitors and non-Flash visitors are the slimmest of minorities. 1-3% on average. If I was targeting the/. market I'd accommodate it. But for a general cross-section of the web? Javascript rules the day.
I'm a partner in a mid-sized software dev firm. We're a job shop that is slowly bringing our own product to market.
Anyhoo, we wrote a route costing app for a certain airline (hint: It wasn't a foreign airline) about 5 years ago and we've upgraded the app about once a year since.
Last year we were asked how much it would cost to re-write as a web app.
It's not a broad app in terms if its function. But it's got a set of algorithms that are very tightly wound and the best guess of my web guys is that writing it in an interpreted language would slow it down considerably. (We're primarily a Python, PHP & Ruby shop when it comes to web dev.)
I told them and asked them why they were unhappy with the current Citrix nFuse (or wevertf it's called this year) deployment.
They weren't, they told me.
Long story shorter, they just wanted a web-style UI.
And they wanted it bad. So bad, that we re-worked every screen in the application.
We made it look like web browser.
There's an address bar, screens can be book-marked, back and forward buttons, all buttons in the app have been re-styled to hide the button border and put a blue underline on the button text. Etc Etc Etc.
Luckily it's not MDI or we'd have been creating a tab interface:)
honestly, that re-design probably cost $25,000.
No functionality was added. Just a different UI.
And this is why i think "cry me a river" whenever airline CEO's are crying to congress about not being able to stay afloat.
...The only thing that really "breaks" from 4 > 5 is database permissions.
And most (all?) shared hosting are handling permissions at their admin level by necessity.
The first time I did this upgrade, probably 2005 or so, I was genuinely surprised at how painless it is.
And the pain-points that are left are SO worth it. MySQL 4 is a toy. It's worse than Access.
And we're not just talking about the lack of "advanced" features like triggers, sprocs, udf's. We're talking about no support for things like nested SELECT's. It's atrocious. The query optimizer is absurd. IIRC, there is actually a performance difference if you join in the WHERE clause opposed to an explicit join in the FROM clause. Now, I'm all for "proper" sql, meaning joins SHOULD be explicit. But the fact is that this query:
select u.fullname, p.phonenumber from users u inner join phonenumbers p on u.userid = p.userid
is logically identical to:
select u.fullname, p.phonenumber from users u, phonenumbers p where u.userid = p.userid
and for a query optimizer to create a different query plan for them is just inexcusable.
MySQL 4 is the reason so many people think poorly of the DB.
Allow me to repost the answer to the same question from above:
There is no such thing as a turing test that can't be solved by a human. That's the entire point.
So measuring it against that criteria just makes no sense.
But the truth is, humans solving CAPTCHAs was never as big of problem as good OCR. Most people just do not have the resources to pay people (with cash or porn) to do data entry all day.
The real problem is that CAPTCHAs themselves have advanced the state of OCR to an extent that you can now buy apps to break a CAP and they're really not that expensive.
Our system tries to make "diversion" slightly more difficult by altering the placement of the test questions on the form. But this system is easily defeated by an attacker who targets a specific site using our software. All they have to do is deduce the test questions and divert them to humans.
Allow me to expand on my last remarks now that I've read the rest of your post.
You see Google as a great chartiable organization that tries to "find out what's interesting."
What I hear from my customers (The people spending the $ to create the interesting sites you desire) is something different: Google is more like the mafia.
That is, "If yous wanna do bidness in dis here internets, you gotta pay up."
And like it or not, SEO's create an Observer Affect. The existence of SEO's means that a legit website either MUST turn to SEO or they MUST hand over 50k-250k a month (or more) on AdWords.
For competitive keywords there is virtually NO CHANCE of reaching the top of the organic results without optimizing the site for GoogleBot.
Now imagine the business owner who is tired of ponying up, say, ONE POINT TWO MILLION A YEAR to Google just so they can have the privilege of running an online business. How can you blame them for seeking an alternative?
And by bashing the whole of SEO you really are painting with a broad brush. There are a lot of crappy techniques employed by black-hat SEO. There are companies, like mine, who refuse to play that game.
But by lumping everybody together, you leave no incentive for a company to chose "honorable" SEO over "dishonorable" SEO.
You apparently are so in love with Google ("they spend a lot of time figuring out what is 'interesting'") that seem unable to realize what is obvious: Google, and Google alone, is responsible for the rise (and further rise, and further rise) of SEO.
So many people in this thread seem to think Google is the altruistic company. Somebody even said something like "if they catch you doing SEO they'll ban you from adwords." That literally made me LOL.
But you want to know the truth? There is no reason GOOG couldn't aggressively attack the SEO industry.
I mean, their business is mining data for search results. Don't you think that they could search their DB for obvious SEO techniques, score them, and all sites above a certain score threshold are immeaditely purged from the results?
Of COURSE they could. So why don't they? One reason: Follow The Money.
Companies that are paying for SEO are, by and large, companies that are already paying for AdWords. It's hard to justify, say, $10k in SEO expenses unless you're seeing a ROI by cutting your dependency on AdWords.
That is, in my experience, sites that employ SEO overlap greatly with the sites that purchase Adwords.
Google has no business interest in getting rid of these sites.
Google has a profit motive first. They are no more pure than any other company. No more pure than the company DOING the SEO. It's all about profit.
And one more thing: Using SEO and being 'interesting' are not mutually exclusive.
Well, if you feel that strongly about the purity of search results -- if you feel that people have no right to develop a website using plain and honest techniques to boost their search rank -- then all I can suggest is that you start using Live.com and Yahoo.com more often.
SEO is a side-effect of Google having too much power over the success and failure of online businesses.
In my opinion as a professional in this industry for a decade, using SEO in this way is no different than creating "AAA Acme Awnings & Siding Co" just so your company will show-up first in the phone book.
There's a lot of SEO I think is unethical -- specifically anything that is surreptitious. But Google is too powerful to act like they don't exist.
If there were 2, 3, 4 strong, popular search engines, each with unique algorithms that resemble but do not emulate each other, that would severely stunt the SEO industry.
I imagine you're the type that would use Google to search for your lost car keys if you could. Nothing wrong with that. But understand that you're supporting Google's monopoly on search and the SEO industry that it's spawned.
That's a good question. Let me preface by saying that I'm not the developer for this app. I know a lot about it, but not all the intimate details.
But the confirmations occur while that test is still the 2nd test on the page. The answers to these auxiliary questions are only accepted if the primary test on the page is passed successfully.
And even after a test "graduates" to a primary test, it's still spot-checked as a secondary test occasionally as a quality control measure.
And the whole idea of the system is to round-robin the questions so the likelihood of the same person or bot seeing the same question is quite low.
That's what we see is the real brilliance of this system: The more people use a standard CAP, the more likely it is to be defeated by a bot since it's a bigger target.
The more people that use our Turing system the quicker new tests are created thru the question>confirm>confirm process.
1> If every 2nd word (in this example) is "Apple Pies" then the problem is keyword stuffing, not excessive internal links
2> Why would we want to? That's the whole point: It boots your organic rank on Google.
if you're somebody who thinks that websites should be developed as if search engines don't exist, then I can see why that's a problem.
But here's the thing... search engines DO exist. And Google has a stranglehold on the market. For all intents, they have a monopoly on search.
If you're a web retailer, unless you're visible thru google, either with AdWords or a top-3 organic rank, you're nobody. And when these companies-- many of them name brands you've heard of-- are paying 50-250k a MONTH in adwords, and we can cut a huge chunk of that off by boosting their organic rank by creating a rich internal link structure, that's a valuable service we're offing these people.
And ethically -- I don't see how you can argue that it's OK for a company to be on the top of the search results page if they pay Google $200k a month, but dammit, if they create a lot of internal links on their site they're doing something wrong.
And some-- like you-- might "give up on it immediately." It's just a question of ROI. Are they attracting enough new customers, and saving enough by cutting their adwords buy, to deal with the loss of the few Slashdot-Snob types that think they're "gaming the system" by creating internal links on their sites.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, there is no "right" way to do corporate accounting. Every company is complex and nuanced. Apple included.
But more to the point: Apple sees a material tax benefit by requiring consideration (read: compensation) for certain types of upgrades.
But there is no legal benefit to charging $10. $1 or $0.10 would be adequate.
And you would make a poor boss, pointy haired or otherwise.
This is about turning a profit. I've been doing this for a long time. Optimizing for the developer is financially smart.
This isn't about building the rare "100 year flood" of an application. You'd be dumb to assume any given app you're developing will reach a critical mass. It's a bad bet.
Besides, it's not as if an app is slow so let's add a server. Clearly the first thing anybody would do is run it under a profiler and look for pinch points.
But optimizing from the get just because of an off chance that the application somehow gains an audience larger than predicted at design time.
No, I don't. I never passed any judgment except to say that if your company is facing bankruptcy, it might be a good idea to sideline inessential spending.
No offense, but I've been in this business (Contract software development) for a long time. Especially by the standards of our industry. And we've prospered.
I'm a software developer who runs a software shop.
And, not for nothing, we sell training to these companies. It's quite profitable for us, and we always have the competitive edge that we built it, we know it better than anyone else.
I'm a pretty good judge of ROI.
And there was no ROI here. The software is no easier to use.
My perception is that you wasted an awful lot of time writing up a response using invented math to prove a company you are unfamiliar with got a good return on a re-skinning of an application that you've never seen.
You're out of your depth.
Allow me to preface by saying that I never once mentioned Drizzle. I see no niche that Drizzle appeals to.
But about MySQL: You're Missing The Point.
First, saying things like "everyone" is just silly. Inno is quite popular. It was purchased by Oracle for a reason: It creates a valuable product that's used by a lot of people.
Second, You're missing the point.
The VAST majority of apps deployed every day are NOT critical-mass applications. They are niche applications developed by (or for) Corporate IT Departments They are applications where the potential userbase is 30 people in an accounting department, or 100 people in a call center.
For these applications, a table lock is truly NOT a big deal.
Do the math. If you have 100 users, only a fraction will be simultaneous. And of those, how much actual server-side processing time is being spent? Even if a user is logged-in for 8 hours a day, what's the cumulative processing time? 2 minutes? 3?
The end product is a very low probability that a race condition will occur due to a table lock. It might happen, what, once a day? And when it does, the user goes back, re-submits, problem solved.
Again, missing the point. These applications have no perceivable IO bottleneck.
And, again, the point was missed:
Of the entire universe of software developers out there, a HUGE majority work for corporate IT departments. These are the people writing most of the software out there. This is the reason VB was in the top 3 most popular languages for nearly 2 decades.
These apps aren't being designed by a CTO. And they don't need to be.
You seem so hung-up on this "the company depends on my DBMS selection" mentality that it seems like you miss the boat entirely.
I think you'd benefit from a reality check.
There's nothing wrong with MySQL. It serves its purpose.
And there's nothing wrong, necessarily, with sacrificing ACID compliance for speed.
The goal for those like you and I is to be sure these younger Dev's are using it appropriately.
For example, during a code review if you see a developer doing a multi-table insert where he's checking for an error and doing a manual roll-back of the insert, that's a perfect time to demonstrate transactions as a way to save the developer time.
Or when a dev wants to denormalize because a given query requires a dozen joins, that's a perfect time to demonstrate a view.
In many ways, the sheer popularity of MySQL gives it legitimacy.
The way to go about it isn't to make a dev feel dumb for using the software. He'll just think "Millions of people are using this, that old coot probably thinks I should be writing this web-app with C++ based CGI Scripts"
Of course, if you're one that thinks MySQL et al have no place in a production environment, maybe they SHOULDN'T be listening to you...
It makes sense.
If you don't normalize, you don't need views OR joins.
You know what I call that? Efficiency. Yep. Efficiency.
Sprocs are faster and more secure.
But they have the downside of splitting your app logic. Many would argue that it makes no sense to hold business logic in the DB tier.
There is no value in being religious about this in a small app with a small team.
But in large environments, it allows DBA's to ensure that every DB customer gets a fair and stable response time.
Think of a table with 1bn rows. If you can only query the views the DBA gives you rights to, you can't accidentally produce a cartesean product by passing-in a poorly coded INNER JOIN that DOS's the server.
And if you can only do an UPDATE via a prepared statement or a SPROC, you can't accidently truncate the table to munge the data by f'ing up your WHERE criteria.
Ask yourself WHY that is.
It's simple: Hardware is MUCH cheaper today than it ever was before, and it'll be even cheaper tomorrow.
You know what ISN'T cheaper? Software developers.
It makes a lot more sense to optimize for the DEVELOPER than it does to optimize for the machine.
I can add another web server for $5000. Adding a developer is at least an order of magnitude more expensive.
+1.
No, +50.
But, the OP is a kid. You have to pay your dues if you want a life where you have the luxury of quitting your job and still having enough $ to live on.
Still, +50.
That's fair.
Especially given your last sentence.
But I would qualify that GWT shouldn't be lumped with "other frameworks."
It's simply a compiler that produces JS instead of Bytecode. As long as you can trust the compiler (and you can trust this compiler) then that removes a lot of headache. I'm not mocking you, but it would be like saying "Assembly is just too much of a beast to debug..."
The beauty is that you never need to debug the JS. If there's an error, you debug the Java inside eclipse.
And in the absolute worst-case scenario, you set the flag that tells GWT not to minimize the JS code so you can track down specific parts of the JS code and use that to tweak the corresponding Java code.
But when was the last time you needed to decompile, say, a C++ application in order to debug it? These things don't happen very often...
Let me preface by saying I started a software development shop with a couple partners about a decade ago. We've got about a dozen developers on staff now. I've probably hired 25 developers in my tenure here. I'm a software developer myself.
There's nothing wrong with enthusiasm. It's definitely an asset.
But there's also nothing wrong with a deep dedication.
If you presented your recent posts in resume format, it would probably throw as big of a red-flag off in my head as a guy who mastered one single language and never branched out.
I don't care who you are, truly mastering a modern language takes at least 6 months. A developer can be proficient in a language in 30 days, especially if he's around other developers that can answer questions. But knowing it inside and out, knowing common pitfalls and how to avoid them, knowing best-practices (and worst practices), knowing the internals of, say, the garbage collector and class loader and event dispatcher, really MASTERING it takes time.
And writing any non-trivial application in a language is going to also take months.
The candidate that can demonstrate that he's mastered increasingly complex languages, and used them to develop increasingly complex applications. That's the holy grail of a job candidate.
Knowing a framework or SDK is really of little value to me. If we do use one that you've tried out, telling me that you've "given a look at it" will mean nothing to me. The frameworks that we do use, we use HARD. We stretch them and manipulate them. But chances are we won't.
What I think you'll find in most software shops, whether they're software companies or just coroporate IT Departments is that no 2 frameworks are ever exactly alike.
That is, once you start using a framework, you can very rarely upgrade it to the next version without breaking your existing codebase.
For this reason, it's common for a company to branch a framework, usually privately, where they augment or supplement it to solve whatever problem they're trying to solve.
Being a slave to the fresh SDK or framework of the day is not an appealing quality. Although I admire your thirst for knowledge, I'd wait to hire you until I could have confidence that you could work with the same language, and the same framework, and maybe even the same app for as long as it takes to get the job done.
My advice to all young developers is exactly what I said above:
Master increasingly complex languages. Stick with it for 6-12 months and master it. And use them to build increasingly complex applications.
You do that, and you've proved your mettle.
Speaking for me only.
just curious.. have you seen Songza?
Pretty cool implementation... uses a "pie" UI style.
So you write all your software in binary?
How is writing in Java and compiling to JavaScript any different than writing in Java and compiling to bytecode?
I think the market has shifted a bit more than you're giving it credit for.
But it all depends on your niche.
We built our business on web retail and we still do an awful lot of it. And in that world, you simply cannot afford to lose a customer due to whatever whizbang technology you want to use at the moment.
But outside of retail is very different.
And the truth is, non-JS visitors and non-Flash visitors are the slimmest of minorities. 1-3% on average. If I was targeting the /. market I'd accommodate it. But for a general cross-section of the web? Javascript rules the day.
I've noticed the same thing.
I'm a partner in a mid-sized software dev firm. We're a job shop that is slowly bringing our own product to market.
Anyhoo, we wrote a route costing app for a certain airline (hint: It wasn't a foreign airline) about 5 years ago and we've upgraded the app about once a year since.
Last year we were asked how much it would cost to re-write as a web app.
It's not a broad app in terms if its function. But it's got a set of algorithms that are very tightly wound and the best guess of my web guys is that writing it in an interpreted language would slow it down considerably. (We're primarily a Python, PHP & Ruby shop when it comes to web dev.)
I told them and asked them why they were unhappy with the current Citrix nFuse (or wevertf it's called this year) deployment.
They weren't, they told me.
Long story shorter, they just wanted a web-style UI.
And they wanted it bad. So bad, that we re-worked every screen in the application.
We made it look like web browser.
There's an address bar, screens can be book-marked, back and forward buttons, all buttons in the app have been re-styled to hide the button border and put a blue underline on the button text. Etc Etc Etc.
Luckily it's not MDI or we'd have been creating a tab interface :)
honestly, that re-design probably cost $25,000.
No functionality was added. Just a different UI.
And this is why i think "cry me a river" whenever airline CEO's are crying to congress about not being able to stay afloat.
I like this "real life" portrayal of the villans used in the 90's movies.
The 90's movies were fantasies. Too over-the-top.
I like how the DK joker was just a crazy guy with scars and grease-paint.
I'd love to see Nolans take on all of them -- Freeze, Penguin, etc.
Ya know, with Dawes being killed-off, this now opens up plotlines for catwoman...
Since when does using a fricken trigger make one a "power user."
Honestly, if I were running a hosting provider, I wouldn't allow triggers just because they slow everything down so much.
I mean, I use them often, but it's very easy to murder server performance by trying to do too much in a trigger (or doing it poorly).
IIRC, the MySQL docs say that the most simple trigger adds a 10% overhead.
...The only thing that really "breaks" from 4 > 5 is database permissions.
And most (all?) shared hosting are handling permissions at their admin level by necessity.
The first time I did this upgrade, probably 2005 or so, I was genuinely surprised at how painless it is.
And the pain-points that are left are SO worth it. MySQL 4 is a toy. It's worse than Access.
And we're not just talking about the lack of "advanced" features like triggers, sprocs, udf's. We're talking about no support for things like nested SELECT's. It's atrocious. The query optimizer is absurd. IIRC, there is actually a performance difference if you join in the WHERE clause opposed to an explicit join in the FROM clause. Now, I'm all for "proper" sql, meaning joins SHOULD be explicit. But the fact is that this query:
is logically identical to:
and for a query optimizer to create a different query plan for them is just inexcusable.
MySQL 4 is the reason so many people think poorly of the DB.
Allow me to repost the answer to the same question from above:
There is no such thing as a turing test that can't be solved by a human. That's the entire point.
So measuring it against that criteria just makes no sense.
But the truth is, humans solving CAPTCHAs was never as big of problem as good OCR. Most people just do not have the resources to pay people (with cash or porn) to do data entry all day.
The real problem is that CAPTCHAs themselves have advanced the state of OCR to an extent that you can now buy apps to break a CAP and they're really not that expensive.
Our system tries to make "diversion" slightly more difficult by altering the placement of the test questions on the form. But this system is easily defeated by an attacker who targets a specific site using our software. All they have to do is deduce the test questions and divert them to humans.
Allow me to expand on my last remarks now that I've read the rest of your post.
You see Google as a great chartiable organization that tries to "find out what's interesting."
What I hear from my customers (The people spending the $ to create the interesting sites you desire) is something different: Google is more like the mafia.
That is, "If yous wanna do bidness in dis here internets, you gotta pay up."
And like it or not, SEO's create an Observer Affect. The existence of SEO's means that a legit website either MUST turn to SEO or they MUST hand over 50k-250k a month (or more) on AdWords.
For competitive keywords there is virtually NO CHANCE of reaching the top of the organic results without optimizing the site for GoogleBot.
Now imagine the business owner who is tired of ponying up, say, ONE POINT TWO MILLION A YEAR to Google just so they can have the privilege of running an online business. How can you blame them for seeking an alternative?
And by bashing the whole of SEO you really are painting with a broad brush. There are a lot of crappy techniques employed by black-hat SEO. There are companies, like mine, who refuse to play that game.
But by lumping everybody together, you leave no incentive for a company to chose "honorable" SEO over "dishonorable" SEO.
You apparently are so in love with Google ("they spend a lot of time figuring out what is 'interesting'") that seem unable to realize what is obvious: Google, and Google alone, is responsible for the rise (and further rise, and further rise) of SEO.
So many people in this thread seem to think Google is the altruistic company. Somebody even said something like "if they catch you doing SEO they'll ban you from adwords." That literally made me LOL.
But you want to know the truth? There is no reason GOOG couldn't aggressively attack the SEO industry.
I mean, their business is mining data for search results. Don't you think that they could search their DB for obvious SEO techniques, score them, and all sites above a certain score threshold are immeaditely purged from the results?
Of COURSE they could. So why don't they? One reason: Follow The Money.
Companies that are paying for SEO are, by and large, companies that are already paying for AdWords. It's hard to justify, say, $10k in SEO expenses unless you're seeing a ROI by cutting your dependency on AdWords.
That is, in my experience, sites that employ SEO overlap greatly with the sites that purchase Adwords.
Google has no business interest in getting rid of these sites.
Google has a profit motive first. They are no more pure than any other company. No more pure than the company DOING the SEO. It's all about profit.
And one more thing: Using SEO and being 'interesting' are not mutually exclusive.
You seem to suggest that they are.
What vitriol?
I'm no attacking you, I'm contending a point no differently than you.
Well, if you feel that strongly about the purity of search results -- if you feel that people have no right to develop a website using plain and honest techniques to boost their search rank -- then all I can suggest is that you start using Live.com and Yahoo.com more often.
SEO is a side-effect of Google having too much power over the success and failure of online businesses.
In my opinion as a professional in this industry for a decade, using SEO in this way is no different than creating "AAA Acme Awnings & Siding Co" just so your company will show-up first in the phone book.
There's a lot of SEO I think is unethical -- specifically anything that is surreptitious. But Google is too powerful to act like they don't exist.
If there were 2, 3, 4 strong, popular search engines, each with unique algorithms that resemble but do not emulate each other, that would severely stunt the SEO industry.
I imagine you're the type that would use Google to search for your lost car keys if you could. Nothing wrong with that. But understand that you're supporting Google's monopoly on search and the SEO industry that it's spawned.
That's a good question. Let me preface by saying that I'm not the developer for this app. I know a lot about it, but not all the intimate details.
But the confirmations occur while that test is still the 2nd test on the page. The answers to these auxiliary questions are only accepted if the primary test on the page is passed successfully.
And even after a test "graduates" to a primary test, it's still spot-checked as a secondary test occasionally as a quality control measure.
And the whole idea of the system is to round-robin the questions so the likelihood of the same person or bot seeing the same question is quite low.
That's what we see is the real brilliance of this system: The more people use a standard CAP, the more likely it is to be defeated by a bot since it's a bigger target.
The more people that use our Turing system the quicker new tests are created thru the question>confirm>confirm process.
1> If every 2nd word (in this example) is "Apple Pies" then the problem is keyword stuffing, not excessive internal links
2> Why would we want to? That's the whole point: It boots your organic rank on Google.
if you're somebody who thinks that websites should be developed as if search engines don't exist, then I can see why that's a problem.
But here's the thing... search engines DO exist. And Google has a stranglehold on the market. For all intents, they have a monopoly on search.
If you're a web retailer, unless you're visible thru google, either with AdWords or a top-3 organic rank, you're nobody. And when these companies-- many of them name brands you've heard of-- are paying 50-250k a MONTH in adwords, and we can cut a huge chunk of that off by boosting their organic rank by creating a rich internal link structure, that's a valuable service we're offing these people.
And ethically -- I don't see how you can argue that it's OK for a company to be on the top of the search results page if they pay Google $200k a month, but dammit, if they create a lot of internal links on their site they're doing something wrong.
And some-- like you-- might "give up on it immediately." It's just a question of ROI. Are they attracting enough new customers, and saving enough by cutting their adwords buy, to deal with the loss of the few Slashdot-Snob types that think they're "gaming the system" by creating internal links on their sites.
I agree, but boolean questions are problematic. Most questions that begin "[is|was] [that|this|your|my]" will have a Yes/No answer.
A computer that just guesses will get it right half the time.
So then you get into having to ask "How good does this dog look?" and then you have to be pretty intelligent about how you score their question.
Not impossible, but easy to get it wrong, I think.